DR Problem - maps won't show

V-Ray V-Ray for 3ds Max Issues
1

Greetings

We have bought a small render farm and so we changed our internal 1Gbit network from workgroup to domain. All machines had their fresh windows instalation, and we can render normally through backburner with no problems at all.

Distribute Render, though, doesn’t work as intended. Both with normal DR and BB DR, the maps and Vraymeshes won’t show up in the DR slaves.

With normal DR only the host shows the textures and VrayMeshes, and all the slave buckets don’t seem to find them (no error feedback though).

With BB DR only the first one that picks the job shows the textures and VrayMesh, regardless of the machine, and all others don’t. As a test we shutdown the machine that picked the job correctly, and immediatly another machine picked up the job, and it rendered correctly, the remaining machines continued to fail to render the textures and vraymeshes though.

We think it could be a problem with Vray or its configuration, because in a normal BB render all the machines work fine.

All our rendernodes have administrator privileges and all paths are UNC.

Our configuration:

Server: Windows Server 2003 x64 SP1 (Vray Server with dongle and BackBurner Manager), 3DS Max 2008 x64
Dell PowerEdge 2900, Dual Quad Xeon 1.6GHz, 4 Gb RAM;

6x Render Nodes: Windows XP x64 SP2, 3DS Max 2008 x64
Dell PowerEdge 1950, Dual Quad Xeon 3.0GHz, 8 Gb RAM;

2x Workstation: Windows XP x64 SP2, 3DS Max 2008 x64
Dell Precision 690, Dual Quad Xeon 3.0GHz, 8 Gb RAM, Quadro FX 4600;

Thanks in advance for any tips/solutions.

2

bump.. bump..

3

sounds like a permissions or mounting issue

Are you running the server as a service?

4

Yes, vrayserver is running as service.. and vrayspawner in rendernodes also.. BB server no (we like to resolve this problem first..)

5

It sounds like a permissions issue then; what user is the service configured to use?

Best regards,
Vlado

6

I confirm in the mornig, but i think is with Domain Adminsitrator / Machine Administrator..
In BB normal job render, every machine the render is ok with textures and vraymeshe’s..

Best regards,

Nicolau Pais

7

Hi again..

Was local… i stop the service put the service with Domain Adminsitrator / Machine Administrator user, start the service and the problem presist…

8

Not sure what is the problem then - V-Ray does not do anything differently for normal/backburner rendering than it does for DR… so other than copying the maps/vrmeshes locally, I’m not sure what else to do.

Best regards,
Vlado

9

Hi,

Thanks for the input Vlado.

Copying all maps and meshes to each machine is impratical, as we are always working/changing/editing them, so that would add a potential problem causer.

We’d appreciate if you could give or link us to a guide with all the steps for preparing a machine for DR, maybe we just missed something.

Best regards :slight_smile:

10

Nicolau,
Have you tried forgetting about running the spawner as a service, and running it locally instead? We use a program called tweakxp (Download TweakUI 64-Bit Edition - NeoSmart Technologies) to enable automatic login, and just copy the shortcut to start the spawner and BB server into the startup folder.

We set the autologin to login as domain admin.

We also set up all the render nodes to have a static IP address. We use a win2k3 server maching for the BB manager and vrlserver with the dongle.

11

Thx Derik.. we try in the morning..

12

Problem solved..

Thx to everyone.. was a mix of problems.. permissions, firewall on in one machine.. and our newbie in Windows Server..

Special thx to Derik.. your post open our eyes… (we don’t try twekxp for now.. next step after this problem..) :slight_smile: